The Open Workshop on Synchronous Languages and Systems

SYNCHRON, the International Open Workshop on Synchronous Programming, is devoted to all aspects of synchronous programming: languages, compiling techniques, formal methods, programming environments, execution platforms, semantics issues, code generation. This traditional workshop has become the annual rendez-vous hotpot of the synchronous community and a ’must’ event for anyone interested in keeping up with the latest developments, in front and behind the scenes, in academic and industrial synchronous research. The workshop is renowned for its informal and open character.

Embedded software and systems are already everywhere (in nuclear power plants, smart grids, pacemakers, cars, trains and subways, planes, rockets and satellites, etc.). Most of these contexts are said to be safety-critical: a failure can cause human injuries or death, or severe environment damage. Others might be “only” business-critical: a failure costs a lot of money. To guarantee a very low probability of failure, the most critical systems are based on costly hardware redundancy, dedicated software development methods, and costly validation methods.

Nanosatellites are not safety-critical, and probably not as business-critical as big commercial satellites. Moreover, they are highly resource-constrained (energy consumption, memory, computing power). These observations could lead to choose cheap solutions. However, given the development time and the cost of the launch procedure, failures should be avoided.

We advocate the idea that the development of embedded software and systems for nanosatellites should try and benefit from the accumulated experience on the development of more critical systems; a key problem is to understand which constraints can be relaxed, and which level of quality can be obtained at a reasonable cost.

Argos is a pure synchronous language inspired by Statecharts. It is a synchronous language in which basic programs are explicit Mealy machines, and the compositions operators are the parallel composition and the hierarchic composition. Automata in the Family of Synchronous Languages is a presentation that contains a good summary of Argos.

Short Description: In the framework of a recently started European CATRENE project, the synchrone group at VERIMAG is looking for candidates for a 3-year Phd scholarship starting October 2013. The candidate will work in cooperation with STMicrolectronics and the other academic and industrial partners of the project (including TU Eindhoven, Synopsys NL, …).

The Synchrone group at VERIMAG has been working in close cooperation with STMicroelectronics since 2002 (already 4 co-supervized PhD students graduated). The general topic of the collaboration is transaction-level modeling for systems-on-a-chip, considering functional, timing and energy consumption properties. The language SystemC is the standard of the domain, and the transaction-level modeling principles (TLM) are now normalized. See related publications.

In the context of the project, we propose the following topic: high-level hierarchical component-based models for functional and non-functional (timing, energy) properties of systems-on-a-chip. High-level meaning higher than SystemC/TLM here. We will keep in mind that the models have to be interoperable with existing SystemC/TLM components, and that the models should be executable. The candidate will benefit from the availability of realistic case-studies provided by the industrial partners; he/she will also start from a well developed set of tools and approaches.